The present invention relates to telescopes, and more particularly relates to telescopes employing an array of sensors, e.g., in a ring configuration.
Applicant""s prior inventive work in the field sought to reduce the cost of achieving diffraction limited imaging performance through turbulent atmospheres on very large ground based telescopes. Some of those approaches were loosely based on work published by Primot in 1989, known as xe2x80x9cdeconvolution from wavefront sensingxe2x80x9dxe2x80x94an advance on speckle imaging methods. Applicant""s work, in part, extended those methods to include very wide fields of view, set within the context of strong anisoplanatism (the point spread function changing rapidly as a function of field angle). The designs and computer simulations were validated at that time, further independent work in the field has generally validated the overall approach, and applicant""s work led to, among other things, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,412,200, 5,448,053, 6,028,300 and 6,084,227.
The present work expands on the foundation set by the earlier work.